Hokey Pokey, page 6
Arthur paused. “But our new friend Glennard is very large. Your visitor would have to be enormous. You’d just woken up – in a closed room, not the outdoors like this – perhaps he seemed bigger? You might be misremembering – it would be quite understandable.”
“I don’t take kindly to having my testimony questioned,” she said crisply, because in his reaction she heard something of Harvey’s tone, the growing disbelief at Nora’s account. Arthur had enjoyed playing detective, and now she had ruled out his theory, he’d rather undermine her version of events than show his knowledge of hotel intrigues was flawed.
“Don’t be prickly.” Arthur sighed. “Haven’t I been terribly obliging? But I can’t abide exaggeration.”
“I exaggerate nothing. You said Westall took in this dog, this Glennard, as a stray? He was begging at the kitchen door?”
“That’s right.”
“Do any other strays do the same?”
“I feel quite sure that a stray larger than Glennard, and an unfriendly one at that, would have a name for himself in these streets. You’ve described a beast, of a sort it would be impossible to smuggle into the hotel. Somebody would have seen a man with a dog the size of a pony roaming the corridors.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Nora said sourly. “Someone knows who the dog is – whether it’s a stray, or belongs to the porter’s aunt. And someone knows who locked me in a room with him. But will any hotel worker deign to tell me? Or will they prefer to keep denying, because a strange man shouldn’t be invading my room while I sleep and the hotel doesn’t want people to panic?”
“They’d admit it to me,” Arthur insisted. “If there’s anything to admit.”
Nora wondered what the workers of the Regent really thought of Arthur Crouch. His longstanding stay, in his eyes, equated to a type of ownership. He really seemed to believe he had a claim to the hotel. But what had workers to gain from being open with him? He might have had longer than the typical guest to observe the rhythms and practices of their working lives; but he couldn’t compel them to say what they knew, or what they observed, among themselves.
They walked the remaining distance to the hotel in silence. At the steps, Arthur said, in a bored way, without even meeting her gaze: “You’re rather a disappointment to me. I thought your suspicion of people was rooted in discernment. But it isn’t. You’re just another hysteric, aren’t you?”
His pomposity was comical. He walked ahead of her up the steps. She stayed where she was for a moment, to be certain they wouldn’t encounter each other again in the lobby. The snow was beginning to fall once more. It would make the paths even again. She plunged her hands into her pockets and looked over at the cathedral. In the graveyard, by the light of the moon, Nora saw a familiar platinum head and a flash of fur. She crossed the street to enter.
6
“I couldn’t bear to be in that building any longer,” Berenice said when Nora approached.
“The hotel? Why not?”
Berenice opened a yellow box labelled Kreteks. Medicinal cigarettes, imported from Java through the Netherlands, because she couldn’t possibly buy a normal brand from a normal shop. She lit one and sat on a gravestone. The kretek crackled as it burnt, quite unlike regular tobacco. Clove-scented smoke carried on the breeze.
“I saw policemen in the lobby.” She shuddered delicately. “I feel sick around men in uniform.”
“Policemen? Has something happened?”
“Some old lady’s missing. I left before anyone saw me. The police will want to use my clairvoyance, to find out what happened to her. I’ve had premonitions of murder ever since I got off the train. I bet some wicked man killed her. Or a woman, they can kill too.”
Berenice was revelling in another silly fantasy, because she loved melodrama. It was testimony to Leo’s infatuation that he married her knowing the visions were a sham. Nora had once sincerely believed in the supernatural, and did no longer, because Leo worked hard to disabuse her. He had done so rather brutally, reconfiguring Nora’s mind so that certain childhood memories were lost, and others, when they arose, intolerable. An image of her mother on all fours flashed through her thoughts and she pushed it away forcefully.
Maybe the police would ask for the Icon’s insights. Leo wasn’t the only one in her thrall. Most people pandered to her. Nora wondered who was the last person to refuse Berenice what she wanted, and whether Berenice had been angry. She’d rather like to see Berenice angry, and to imitate her anger.
“Don’t you think Mrs Reid will have fallen in the snow?” Nora asked. “I sat with her at dinner during your vision. She’s a batty old thing, quite ordinary. I don’t imagine there’s any mystery surrounding her at all.”
Berenice shrugged. “You can’t know what she’s done in her life.”
“No. It’s just my impression on meeting her.”
“I thought you were a great believer in my clairvoyance. Or were you lying about that?” Berenice addressed the question to her cigarette. She appeared to be musing, rather than accusatory. “Perhaps you were buttering me up. I think you wanted to be close to me.”
This was true, wasn’t it? Although not in the way Berenice meant, going by her indulgent tone. She thought Nora was infatuated with her beauty, hungry for contact.
Berenice threw her head back and laughed. “Your face! I’m just kidding. You do keep following me. The funny thing is, Dr Dickinson, I did think you were lying when you stood outside my door. I thought you were lying about why you were there, and about who you were. But when you admired my clairvoyance, I never heard anything sound so true.”
The accusation pierced Nora where she was most vulnerable. Of course that part sounded true. She was mimicking the other guests, and Nora was a true and faithful recorder. People questioned her authenticity the moment she stopped pretending to be anyone but herself.
“Come on now,” Berenice teased. She tweaked Nora’s sleeve to pull her forward. “It’s nice to be admired. But I have to joke about it. You don’t understand how hard it is to possess a gift like mine. People are scared of it – or they’re enamoured, but see me as an entertainment, like a stage magician.”
“Or a freak in the circus.”
Berenice said nothing for several seconds, then laughed.
“Yes, yes, like someone in the circus.” She let go of Nora with a playful shove. Nora rubbed her arm. Berenice was infuriating: she faked clairvoyance to feel the adoration of strangers, then faked stoicism for enduring it. Nora stamped her feet to warm them.
“I understand very well what it is to be gifted,” Nora said.
The amusement hadn’t left Berenice’s features. “Is that right, Dr Dickinson?”
“I also have an ability that unnerves people.”
“Whatever it is, nobody’s on your tail for it. My gift precedes me. Everyone knows who I am, and what I can do, before we’ve exchanged two words.”
Nora remembered Gruszinskaya, the Russian ballerina in that Baum novel, crying all the time because she wanted to be alone. Everyone loved an aloof beauty and didn’t Berenice know it: she’d play that part even if fame was no hardship for her. Fame was the fount of all the attention she craved.
“You’re right,” Nora agreed. “We aren’t similar in that way.”
“Tell me your gift.”
“I’m a mimic.”
“What? A cheap comedian?”
That was rich: for Berenice to sneer at Nora’s talents, while her own were entirely fabricated.
Nora smoothed her coat. She opened her mouth, and sang, exactly as she had heard it, Berenice’s Russian song from the cocktail bar. The words echoed Berenice’s perfectly. Every syllable, every note. Nora relaxed into Berenice’s posture. Her expressions were no longer her own. They were Berenice’s. And it was blissful, to be inside Berenice, rather than watching her while being nothing at all.
The song stopped. Berenice’s eyes were round and glassy. Nora recalled the images that had burst through her mind when Berenice sang in the bar. Had those images appeared in Berenice’s mind now? Maybe they’d swapped places, for those short, delectable minutes.
“I’m a recorder,” Nora said. “I have heard this song, once and once only, when you sang it for the guests of the hotel. The language isn’t even known to me.”
“Huh. Aren’t you the little mynah bird?” Gratifyingly, Berenice no longer looked smug, and her speech had lost its sugar. She seemed to accept one exposure was enough, even in an unknown language. Nora knew opera singers were capable of picking up songs without prior fluency. Sure enough Berenice added: “You’re definitely not trained?”
“No. Don’t you think I sound like you?”
“I don’t sound or look anything like you.”
People didn’t like to be confronted with themselves. Sometimes people recoiled as though from an unflattering photograph. Nora had learnt this early, as a very little child.
“Put it properly to the test,” Nora suggested. “You’re married. Shall I telephone your husband and pretend I’m you? Would he know the difference?”
“Yes, he would know.”
“Prove it!”
“The telephones aren’t working.”
Of course they weren’t.
“Your singing partner then,” said Nora. If Merlini were truly enamoured with Berenice, he’d suffice. Nora would enjoy him saying she was her match. “Blindfold him. Let him tell us apart.”
But Berenice shook her head and hopped off the gravestone. She drew her coat closer around her and walked away, in the direction of the hotel. The unbearable omens of doom that she claimed had driven her to the graveyard must no longer be so hard for her to tolerate.
In the middle of the road she turned, the toss of her platinum hair coquettish.
“Be careful!” she called back. “If you’re so good at copying, you might copy something really evil by mistake. There’s a killer around, Dr Dickinson. I feel it in my bones!”
Nora didn’t reply. She stayed where she was until Berenice had moved inside, and realised she was still unwilling to enter the hotel. Not because of Berenice’s silly closing words. Rather, a person had entered Nora’s room as she slept, but he shouldn’t have been there and it was no longer a safe retreat. For now the snow in the graveyard was preferable.
Berenice had left her packet of kreteks on the gravestone. Nora took one out, slid the remainder into her pocket, and lit it in imitation of Berenice. She inhaled and exhaled as Berenice did. She would take everything from her, even the way she smoked a cigarette.
Moving from grave to grave to keep warm, Nora read what names she could in the moonlight. Every inch of this cemetery had been used for burials, making the earth ankle-twistingly uneven beneath the deceptive snow cover. What a lot of dead Birmingham had. Crouch had been telling Mrs Reid about the cemetery, when Nora first met them. Nora had been focused on Berenice, but some information must have taken hold, for she knew that the boundary between the road and cemetery had been moved to widen the streets without relocating the bodies. Skeletons were strewn deep beneath the cars that motored through when the roads were clear. Now the cars were as still as the dead, immobile at the pavement side in the mounting snow.
She approached a limestone obelisk near the cathedral doors. It was as tall as the building itself, and bore, in relief, the dates and places of a military feat. She was just brushing some snow away to read the name of a dead colonel when she heard the crunch of footfall. Over by the corner of the cathedral was a dog. Even in the moonlight she was certain it was the dog from her room – as certain as she had been Glennard was not the dog in question. He was of the same implausible size. And he wasn’t alone. He was leashed by a tall thin man in a dark coat; his age and features were otherwise hard to discern, between his bowler and the raised lapels obscuring his jaw. Dog and owner kept uncannily in step with each other, as if one mind were shared between them. They didn’t see Nora. The man pushed open the cathedral door, casting a trapezium of light on the snow; then he walked the dog inside, and the door slowly closed behind them.
Was it safe to confront him? She couldn’t know that. But if she followed, she might catch sight of his face. Though Nora had little faith in the housekeeper, or Crouch, to listen to her description at this point, being able to visually identify him would surely stand her in good stead. She might recognise him as one of the porters or managers or even a waiter.
So she followed, with caution. When she opened the door she was met with the illumination of candles, but barely more warmth than outside. Quietly she stepped within. Beyond the arcaded porch, she saw many rows of pews and marbled columns. The stained glass window was at the far end, though the images were no longer clear from this angle, against the night sky as they were. All the seats were empty. An old woman in a fawn knitted dress was sweeping the floor.
Where was the man now? An upper gallery of pews hung above them on either side. He must be seated upstairs. Nora took the winding staircase by the door, quailing at the creak of the wood beneath her weight; she would have preferred to approach without warning. But it didn’t matter, because the seats there were empty too.
She returned to the sweeping woman. The cleaner had white hair sparse enough to reveal the scalp beneath and her eyes were a milked-over blue.
“Excuse me,” Nora said quietly. “I was just looking for the gentleman who came in with his dog?”
“No one here but you and me, bab,” the woman replied.
Bab. They said that locally. It was years since Nora had heard it.
“I saw a man come in,” Nora said.
The old woman shook her head, lips pursed. Maybe her eyesight or hearing was failing. Certainly Nora couldn’t think why she would lie over such a thing.
“And there’s no other exit?”
“That’s the only unlocked door,” the old woman said, with a nod at the entrance Nora had arrived by. “Big black dog, was it?”
“Yes, very big!” Nora leapt on the question. Maybe the sweeper had missed him this time, but he regularly came here. “I’ve never seen so large a dog. Do you know the man who owns him?”
The old woman laughed. “You saw Edward Markham.”
At the name, Nora thought of stinging nettles. Hokey pokey, splattered with blood in a glade. The room slid sideways.
“Eh eh eh!” The old woman sprang forward, letting the broom drop onto the flags, and grasped Nora by the elbow to prevent her fall. “You all right?”
“I’m sorry.” Nora righted herself, embarrassed. “I don’t know why I felt so faint. I’m fine.”
“You’re not. You’ve gone white. You should get home. Do you have far to go?”
Nora gaped, unsure how to answer. She should have said – I’m staying in the hotel opposite, except then she would have to go there. “I live very far away,” she said, like a child who has lost sight of her mother. “I’m trapped here by the snow!”
“What! That’s no good. I’m good as done here, bab, come with me. You can have a tea at mine. I only live round the corner.” A new crease, grooved deeply between the wrinkles at the bridge of her nose, signalled the old woman’s concern.
Nora picked up the broom, to save her elder bending down, and to signal her own restoration to normality. She returned the broom to its owner. “I can get home. I spoke too dramatically – it’s only snow.”
“None of that.” The old woman was decided. “You’re going to have a hot drink with me at least. Just have to fetch me coat.”
She took the broom into the shadows of the cathedral. Nora waited, relenting to the offer of tea, with secret relief at the cleaner’s insistence.
“Now. I’m Enid,” said the old woman, returning in a patched maroon reefer and a sage woollen hat.
“I’m Nora.”
Side by side they left the building. By now the snow was deep enough to make a foothold difficult, and Nora felt more justified in accepting Enid’s invitation. It would be terrible to let an old woman find her way back in these conditions. They passed two pairs of policemen, equipped with torch boxes, in search of another old woman needing aid: Mrs Reid.
Enid and Nora reached the road arm in arm. Music drifted from the hotel, softened by the fresh snow cover.
“You just stick with me.” Enid was wheezing. “It’s over this way, and the first left.”
Nora hadn’t taken this turning before, which was too poorly lit to make out the buildings in any detail. The two women were plunged into a steep downwards incline, which required a slowed pace not to slip. Everyone else must have already taken shelter, because they didn’t encounter another soul, before reaching a mean-looking brick boarding house at the end of the street.
“Here we are.” Enid let go of Nora to grasp the iron railing at the side of the steps. She pushed the front door open and stamped her boots on the mat. “Come in! Come in!”
Nora obeyed, spying the dirty face of a toddler on the stairs, who ran away as soon as he realised he’d been spotted.
“Home sweet home.” Enid opened one of the doors off the corridor and Nora waited for her to light the gas lamp before entering. She saw a bedsitter, with another door off the side – to a crude kitchen, Nora guessed.
“Sit down,” Enid urged, nudging Nora into a winged armchair. “I’ll make the tea.”
Nora, once seated, took in the details of this carefully neat room: the pale green linoleum with its trompe l’oeil rug, the cast iron bed with each leg in a bowl of water, the drop leaf table under a small window on the darkness. A faint odour of haddock permeated the air; indelible, formed by the preparation of many breakfasts.
Cautiously, Nora said: “You mentioned Edward Markham. Who is he?”
Enid laughed uncomfortably from the kitchen. Nora heard the clink of cups on saucers.
“Don’t worry about that. Silly of me to mention him. In a church as well!”
“No – please do go on. I’d like to know.”
Enid moved into the doorway, twisting and untwisting a worn tea towel.
“I hadn’t thought of him in a while. Just coincidence that someone else was asking about him this week. Small, old-fashioned-looking, bit snooty. She wanted to know if he’d ever attended a service.” Enid paused. “He used to be an accountant. Worked at a firm called Parkes, just round the corner from here. Years ago, before the war. Came up on the train each day on the Shakespeare Line. Sometimes he’d bring his dog.”
